Obama's Wrecking Train Continues to Roll!!!

http://www.cagle.com/2014/01/obama-dope/#.Ut_r2efGUFY.email
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The Obama Administration took another step in wrecking military discipline today.

When I was in service I was told one of the reasons you shaved was because if you sustained a face wound you were more susceptible to bacterial infection. Perhaps that no longer is meaningful but the idea of  wearing a uniform is so everything will be uniform.

Now we are going to have those who volunteer to serve suing because their personal sensibilities have been challenged.

 Just more Obama crap to change and weaken our nation's ability to accomplish the single most important reason for government - defend its citizens!!!!
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More Socially Unacceptable Humor:

I saw a poor old lady fall over today on the ice!! At least I presume she was poor - she only had $1.20 in her purse.

My girlfriend thinks that I'm a stalker. Well, she's not exactly my girlfriend yet.

I was explaining to my wife last night that when you die you get reincarnated but must come back as a different creature. She said she would like to come back as a cow. I said, "You're obviously not listening".

The wife has been missing a week now. Police said to prepare for the worst. So, I went to the thrift shop and got all of her clothes back.

You can say lots of bad things about pedophiles but at least they drive slowly past schools.

The Red Cross have just knocked at our door and asked if we could help towards the drought in Pakistan. I said we would love to, but our garden hose only reaches the driveway.

For those who haven't heard, Washington State recently passed two laws.

One legalized gay marriage and the other legalized recreational marijuana.

The fact that gay marriage and marijuana were legalized on the same day makes perfect biblical sense. 

 Leviticus 20:13 says: "If a man lies with another man he should be stoned."

Guess we just hadn't interpreted this verse correctly until now.

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 This is Doc George Lombardi who treated the late Mother Teresa in the

80's at Calcutta. It's laced with poignant  humor, in his inimitable
style, but you can see the hand of God all over this story.

http://youtu.be/vD9RI2Bm69U

I suspect Obama will soon have Holder bring a law suit against these Nuns.

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Be prepared! (See 1 below.)

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Will Obama bypass Congress regarding Iran? (see 2 and 2a below.)

Meanwhile Iran continues to hang its own. (See 2b below.)

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Obama's new shtick is income equality.  He learned this crap from Alinsky and Soros.  The former a left wing  radical and the latter a billionaire who helped break England's currency.

Freedom brings opportunity and uneven outcomes.  Free markets brings  opportunity, uneven outcomes but betterment.  One's character, self-reliance, personal initiative and skills brings opportunity and uneven results.

Why is this so?  Because we are humans and not everyone is the same..

Obama believes government can bring equal opportunity and results. Every time it has tried it has destroyed freedom, crushed initiative, reduced skills and created dependency.  This is the European Social model and this is Obama's dream for America.  Reduce our greatness as a nation so we will be an also run.

Rest assured, this is what his SOTU  Address will focus on because everything else he has promised has turned out to be either a lie or a failure. He has nothing to show for his 5 years except blaming others for his own incompetence.
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Dick

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1)

I WONDER IF THE NEW GENERATION EDUCATED WITH “COMMON CORE” WILL HAVE THE ABILITY TO DESIGN AND BUILD THE NEXT GENERATION OF PLANES AND WEAPONS?

  

The world's most expensive aircraft has a devastating new bomb that may yet end North Korea 's nuclear pretensions. More to the point, they've just tossed the keys to an RAF pilot. LIVE reports from a top secret USAF base in Missouri on a very British coup

The Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. The B-2 flies combat missions across the planet from here. There are two ways for a Briton to get close to the world's most expensive bomber. One involves a year of emails, faxes and phone calls involving the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department to obtain permission to visit Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri , where the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers are based.

The other is to join the RAF. There, you must spend years flying fighter jets and apply for the one spot that opens up every three years on the world's most exclusive exchange program. The advantage to this approach is that you could eventually pilot a $2 billion aircraft that gets more technically advanced each month - and is soon to carry one of the biggest bombs ever built. It is also this avenue that means a Brit may be in charge of the first strike of the next war.

Whiteman is just off U.S. Route 50, among the rolling green fields of Missouri, and dwarfs its nearest neighbor, the tiny town of Knob Noster, (Population 2,709.  2010 census.) A country road through forest leads past a trailer park to the base's main gate. Once inside, Whiteman is like a quiet, ordered new town - complete with supermarket, coffee shop, bar and restaurant, and even a swimming pool and a baseball diamond - but you can't just drive through.

A B-2 takes off at Whiteman. Its' advocates believe it retains strategic value in an uncertain world. As instructed, I wait in the car park of a nearby golf course where I'm met by members of base staff, who check my papers and remain within a few feet of me at all times. I'm transferred to another car and driven onto the base, which is home to nearly 4,000 active-service personnel along with their families and reservists.

We're in the heart of the U.S. , thousands of miles from any border, but the B-2 flies combat missions across the planet from here, so Whiteman is classed as a front-line base. Consequently, much of the detail of how the B-2 gets to and from its targets, undetected by radar, remains secret.

One B-2 carries 40 tornados-worth of munitions. It's a huge deal to be involved!Some critics believe that the B-2 is a Cold War relic that was rendered obsolete when the Berlin Wall came down months after its first flight in 1989. They say there's no point having an aircraft that's invisible to radar when the US and its allies are fighting insurgents armed with Fifties rifles and home-made bombs. However, the B-2's advocates believe it retains strategic value in an uncertain, ever-changing world. The ageing aircraft is currently undergoing upgrades to ensure it remains the most capable weapons platform on Earth.

B-2 Spirit Of Mississippi in its dock.

'The objective is never to use the B-2 in war,' says Brigadier General Robert Wheeler, commanding officer of the 509th Bomb Wing- the man in charge of the B-2 fleet - when I meet him in Whiteman's HQ. 'When I train my folks, I say: "When we use this, we've already failed." But there's virtually no target in the world that we cannot hit, and if the National Command Authority (the U.S. President and Secretary of Defense), in conjunction with our allies, decide that we have to take something out, it's gonna happen - and nobody can stop that. The B-2's objective is to deter other nations from doing things the wrong way.'

RAF Sqn Ldr Jon Killerby, who is qualified as a B-2 instructor.

The latest stage of the B-2's evolution will see it carry the new Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).

The 30,000lb precision-guided 'bunker-buster' bomb, 20ft long, is designed to blast through 200m of reinforced concrete and destroy buried targets. Many experts assume it is being readied for possible use on nuclear weapons factories in Iran or North Korea.

My paperwork is scrutinized again at a second checkpoint. The car is checked to make sure stones or other debris aren't going to be brought near to the aircraft. Ahead are the 'docks' - a row of 14 purpose-built air-conditioned hangars housing the B-2s. I'm driven across the taxi-way to one of the docks, the door slides open and there it is: aircraft serial number 82-1071, the Spirit Of Mississippi, a vast, dark grey set of sweeping curves etched in titanium and secret materials. Apart from the three sets of wheels beneath the middle of the aircraft, and the massive bomb-bay doors that hang open underneath its swollen belly, there are no vertical surfaces: just one huge, rippling wing.

The B-2's unearthly looks reflect its unique role - to kick down the door at the beginning of a war, clandestinely taking out radar installations and air-defense batteries and ensuring control of enemy airspace. Unlike other American bombers, the B-2 would do this without being seen by radar.

With its conventional shape, huge tail and eight wing-mounted engines, the famous B-52's radar cross section (RCS) is huge: to a trained radar operator, it's no challenge to track an object that appears to be the size of a warehouse. The B-2 is said to appear on radar no bigger than a bird.

Only 21 B-2s were built. That number became even smaller in February 2008 when the unthinkable happened, and aircraft 89-0127, the Spirit Of Kansas, crashed during take-off at Andersen Air Force Base on the Pacific island of Guam .

The first paragraph of the summary of the investigation into that accident reads: 'The Mishap Aircraft was destroyed at a total loss of $1,407,006,920.'

Maintenance crew wash the wheels of a B-2.

The tiny B-2 fleet has fought in three wars so far: in Serbia in 1999; in Afghanistan in October 2001; and in the air war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. Wheeler's team at Whiteman have to be ready for whatever America 's political leaders want them to do. The continual improvements to the aircraft and its armaments give military planners ever more sophisticated options: later this year, a B-2 could take to the air with an MOP in one bomb bay and as many as 100 smaller GPS-guided missiles in the other, and use each bomb against a different target on a single flight - all from 50,000ft, and without an enemy even knowing it was there.

But it's not only the aircraft that are being prepared at Whiteman: just as vital are the pilots. Since 2004, of the 80 or so people qualified to fly the B-2 at any one time, one has always been British, thanks to a special extension to the Royal Air Force/ USAF Personnel Exchange Program.

As I arrive at Whiteman, Flight Lieutenant Adam Curd, a Tornado GR4 pilot from RAF's 14 Squadron, is training to fly the B-2, while his fellow Tornado pilot, Squadron Leader Jon Killerby, is now coming to the end of his three years in Missouri, during which time he has qualified as a B-2 instructor. 'Fewer people have flown this aircraft than have flown in the Space Shuttle,' says Squadron Leader Killerby, who is only the second Briton to fly the B-2.

A dummy 30,000lb 'bunker-buster' Massive Ordinance Penetrator bomb in the bomb bay.

'You may not be flying a fast jet and pulling Gs, but one B-2 carries 40 Tornados-worth of munitions. It's a huge deal to be involved.' Killerby was the mission commander when two B-2s flew in to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire in 2007: And, a B-2 dock has been built there, so it can be used as a forward operating location. The exchange also gives British pilots insights into how to use stealth aircraft ahead of the arrival of the RAF's first stealth jet, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which should enter service around 2016.

Some of the differences from conventional aircraft are inescapable.

'The first thing that struck me when I came out here was the airplane's size,' says Killerby. 'But it handles much like a smaller airplane would. Also, we do a lot of low-level flying in the UK , but most of the stuff we do here is at airliner altitudes.'

The longest flight Killerby has made in a Tornado was eight hours: a B-2 training flight from Whiteman to Alaska and back took him almost 25 hours.

'It's interesting to find yourself at the end of a 24-hour sortie having to fly a $2 billion airplane on approach, sometimes in bad weather. I'd say up to 16 hours is easy, but on the 24-hour sorties I've done, I've felt great, then I've got down on the ground and I've felt wiped out.'

Whiteman employs a physiologist who examines rest, sleep and nutrition, tailoring special timetables for each pilot so that the main pressure points - take-off, landing, refueling, weapons drop - happen at the peaks of their circadian rhythms. Sleeping time is tightly controlled (there is a small space in the cockpit where crew members can have a nap) and pilots are also prescribed 'go-pills' - amphetamines and similar medicines often used to treat sleep disorders - to ensure they remain alert.

13th Bomb Squadron changing room.

It's a flying experience that demands high levels of concentration and patience, so those who are selected for the program are usually very experienced airmen. Many come from an engineering or mathematical background: among the current B-2 pilot cadre, six have math degrees from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Before getting airborne in a B-2, a new recruit has to master the smaller Northrop T-38 jet. The small number of aircraft means that an active B-2 pilot may only fly the bomber twice per month, mostly to bombing ranges in the U.S., or electronically simulating attacks on buildings, bridges and other targets within a couple of hours' flying time of Whiteman. 'When you've got the basics, they put you into the simulators, then they start introducing weapons and tactics,' says Flight Lieutenant Curd.

Once the simulator work is complete - including a 24-hour virtual mission - a trainee must make 11 flights in the pilot seat of the B-2, with an instructor alongside. A further, 12th 'check flight' is in effect a B-2 driving test.

As it passes its 21st birthday, parts of the B-2 are showing their age. It was designed and built with Seventies and Eighties technology. One of the companies that makes components for the B-2 was forced to scour eBay for spare test equipment when it discovered that a mains unit that needed replacing was no longer in production.

Back in 1995, the B-2's manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, had offered to build a further 20 B-2s at a 'flyaway price' of $566 million each. The U.S. government did not take Northrop up on their offer, and the production lines were closed down.

Yet the current upgrades show that the B-2 is only perhaps now coming of age. Halting production may come to be seen as one of the shortest-sighted decisions in the history of military aviation.

(Oh really!  Thank you Congress.  Fund more money for welfare please.  The harvest we reap from the monies invested there, is staggering.  Mainly more recipients.)

'I think one of the biggest mistakes we made with this aircraft was to call the damn thing a bomber - we should've called it a weapons platform,' says Ken Gallagher, site manager for Northrop at Whiteman.

'If only we'd known what was coming in the future.'

Behind the seats, once the cockpit door is closed, the ladder pulled up and the floor panel replaced, there is just enough room for one pilot to put down a sleeping bag and take a short nap while the other crew member flies the aircraft. Some B-2s have also been fitted with a microwave oven so crews can prepare hot meals. The one part of the aircraft the crews aren't happy with? Apparently, the cup holders (out of shot) are too small.

Engines are started while the aircraft is in the dock - the rear door of the dock is opened so that the exhaust blast doesn't blow a hole in the wall. The aircraft is towed in and out of the dock, much like a passenger jet, but it taxis under its own power once outside.

The pilot sits on the left, with the mission controller, who ensures the weapons are correctly deployed, on the right. The aircraft's shape makes it difficult to operate manually, so, in common with many advanced modern aircraft, it uses a 'fly-by-wire' system, which means its computers are in control of the minute-by-minute basics.

Today's smart bombs are guided to targets by GPS and laser targeting, so the mission commander will 'fly' the B-2 by punching target information into the computers, which will then steer the aircraft to the right place from which to launch its weapons at the target.

Here, we've highlighted some of the essential controls in the cockpit - the location of the switch that fires the missiles is, of course, classified..

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2)

Will Obama Bypass Congress on Iran?

Over the past several weeks, the White House has been waging an increasingly nasty fight to stop congressional action to put new Iran sanctions in place in the event that the current round of nuclear talks fail. Although 58 senators have co-sponsored the proposed legislation that would tighten the restrictions on doing business with the tyrannical Islamist regime, the Obama administration seems to have acquired the upper hand in the battle. This is largely because of specious arguments claiming those who want to give the president more leverage in the next round of negotiations are actually seeking war rather than a diplomatic solution when the reality is just the opposite. The only hope for a deal that would avert an outcome in which the U.S. would have to choose between the use of force and a nuclear Iran is the adoption of tougher sanctions that would force the ayatollahs to give up their nuclear dreams.

But the current uphill struggle by a majority of the Senate to ensure that the end of the current talks doesn’t lead to a collapse of the sanctions may be only a sideshow to the real fight over Iran that lies ahead in 2014. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, the administration is thinking ahead to the next step in the debate over Iran and exploring the possibility of lifting sanctions without congressional approval.

Congressional insiders say that the White House is worried Congress will exert oversight of the deal and demand tougher nuclear restrictions on Tehran in exchange for sanctions relief. [makes sense to me]

Top White House aides have been “talking about ways to do that [lift sanctions] without Congress and we have no idea yet what that means,” said one senior congressional aide who works on sanctions. “They’re looking for a way to lift them by fiat, overrule U.S. law, drive over the sanctions, and declare that they are lifted.”

Although only Congress has the power to revoke the sanctions it has enacted, this is not a far-fetched scenario. It is entirely possible that the president may wish to end sanctions on his own. That could come as the result of a nuclear deal that failed to satisfy those who rightly worry about the possibility of an agreement that left Iran with its nuclear infrastructure intact. Or it might be part of a further effort to appease Tehran by scaling back sanctions in order to entice it to sign a deal. And the president believes he can achieve these ends by executive action that would come dangerously close to unconstitutional behavior, but for which Congress might have no remedy.

The key to any unilateral action by the president on sanctions is effective enforcement. It has long been understood by insiders that the U.S. government has only selectively enforced the existing sanctions on Iran. In 2010, the New York Times reported that more than 10,000 exemptions had already been granted by the Treasury Department to companies wishing to transact business with Iran. Since then there have been worries that the administration has been slow to open new cases by which suspicious economic activity with Iran could be proscribed.

As the Washington Institute for Near East Policy noted in a paper published in November 2013, the president can legitimize a policy of non-enforcement by the granting of waivers that could effectively gut any and all sanctions enacted by Congress. The only effective check on such a decision would be the political firestorm that would inevitably follow a relaxation of the sanctions that would be accurately viewed as a craven offering to the ayatollahs and also an affront to both Congress and America’s Middle East allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that rightly fear a nuclear Iran.

The administration has already made clear on other contentious issues, such as the application of immigration law, that it will only enforce laws with which it agrees. This is clearly unconstitutional, but as we have already seen with the president’s unilateral actions on immigration, Congress cannot prevent him from doing what he likes in these matters. The same might be true on Iran sanctions, especially if he is prepared to double down on inflammatory arguments falsely labeling sanctions proponents as warmongers.

Having begun the process of loosening sanctions on Iran with the interim deal signed in November and seemingly intent on promoting a new détente with Tehran, it requires no great leap of imagination to envision the next step in this process. Unless the president produces a deal that truly ends the Iranian nuclear threat—something that would require the dismantling of Iran’s facilities and ensuring it could not possibly continue enriching uranium or building plutonium plants—a confrontation with Congress is likely. In that event, it appears probable that the president will choose to run roughshod over the will of Congress and the rule of law.

2a)  No Endgame in Sight

Technicians work at a uranium processing site in Isfahan, 2005. (Courtesy Reuters)

In “Still Time to Attack Iran,” Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig echoes an argument that has been making the rounds in Washington — that nuclear negotiations must result in the complete elimination of Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle program to be considered a success. This is the standard logic a bipartisan group of U.S. senators — including Robert Menendez (D–N.J.), Mark Kirk (R–Ill.), and Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.) — embraced last month when they introduced legislation that would torpedo any final agreement that allowed Iran to retain any enrichment capabilities and facilities.

The senators’ preferred policy sets an unachievable goal. Yes, the world would be a safer place if Iran did not enrich uranium. But contrary to the arguments that hawks put forward, the United States is not in any position to prevent Iran from doing so. Iran is one of 14 countries that already enrich uranium. Even if Iran deserves to be singled out for having broken conditions that other uranium-enriching states uphold and offering weak civilian rationales for enriching, the unfortunate fact is that neither more sanctions nor military strikes will push Iran out of the enrichment club. Iran has already paid tens of billions of dollars in direct costs; lost more than $100 billion in sanctions; and suffered a cyberattack, the assassination of key scientists and engineers, and the perpetual threat of war to protect its self-proclaimed right to enrich uranium. There is no reason to think that more sanctions or military strikes would change Tehran’s stance now.

It is telling that congressional hawks do not explain how they intend on eliminating Iran’s enrichment program in the long term. They are fond of citing military strikes as a final trump card, but such strikes are almost certainly incapable of ending Iran’s enrichment program on their own. To do so, they would have to eliminate not only Iran’s enrichment infrastructure but its capacity to reconstitute it and the Iranian leadership’s determination to do so. There is good reason to believe that military strikes would not achieve any of these goals. Indeed, as Avner Golov and Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence (and one of the pilots who conducted Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor) have written recently, “An attack, no matter how successful, cannot stop Iran’s military nuclear program forever.”

There is a real possibility that some existing facilities for manufacturing and operating nuclear centrifuges would escape destruction. (And if Iran does have secret, unknown enrichment facilities, as Israel alleges, it would by definition be impossible for the United States to know whether it had destroyed them all.) Furthermore, given that Iran has had at least a decade to prepare for such a military attack, it likely has contingency plans to resurrect its nuclear program quickly with whatever facilities and nuclear scientists survive the attack.

The hawks counter that an attack could be combined with a strengthened sanctions regime that would severely restrict Iran’s capacity to rebuild its destroyed nuclear infrastructure. But the United States or Israel would need to apply vast diplomatic leverage to gain international support for such sanctions, something an attack against Iranian enrichment facilities would make nearly impossible. Hawks blithely assume that existing international sanctions on Iran would continue after military strikes, but a number of key governments that now enforce sanctions — among them China, India, Japan, Russia, and Turkey — have emphasized that they do not support military action against Iran. They might defect from any sanctions regime in protest over an illegal military attack aimed at stopping enrichment in Iran.

Hawks also neglect the possibility that Iran could respond to military strikes with its own diplomatic offensive. It is easy to imagine Tehran going to the UN Security Council after an Israeli strike to demand action against Israel, a nuclear-armed state that was complicit in an act of illegal aggression against Iran for merely exercising what it believes to be its right to enrich uranium. Iran could say that, if the Security Council refuses to impose sanctions on Israel, Iran would have no means of self-defense other than withdrawing from the Nonproliferation Treaty and taking action against Israel as it sees fit. No doubt the United States would block action in the Security Council. But many states would express sympathy for Iran and welcome the opportunity to isolate Israel and its protector. In this scenario, Israel’s already declining international legitimacy would plunge, while demand for Israel’s nuclear disarmament would grow, and international support for sanctions on Iran would quickly dissolve.

The Israeli government and hawks in the U.S. Congress rightly emphasize the importance of a long-term verification regime in Iran. But they do not discuss how the international community could establish or operate one in Iran after an attack. Right now, Iran cooperates with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s verification of its nuclear program. Inspectors are unarmed. Iranians permit them to access enrichment sites. After being attacked by Israel, Iran would be unlikely to forsake enrichment and allow on-site inspectors and constant long-distance monitoring of its declared and suspected nuclear activities.

After eight years of diplomacy, the P5+1 have reluctantly concluded that the only realistic course is to negotiate a long-term agreement in which Iran would circumscribe its enrichment activities, eschew completion of a heavy-water reactor, forgo research and development related to nuclear militarization, and accept robust verification procedures to build international confidence that all such commitments will be fulfilled. The threat of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons will remain in the background of any further negotiations, of course, as U.S. President Barack Obama has insisted.

But it is important to underscore what must be in the foreground of these negotiations — not the cessation of Iran’s nuclear enrichment but its capacity to create a nuclear weapon quickly. In that way, international diplomacy and the threat of force go hand in hand: If Tehran rejected a diplomatic solution that allowed carefully limited enrichment in Iran, or if Iran agreed to such an arrangement and then violated it, military action would be legally and politically defensible. That is why the Obama administration’s strategy should not be impeded by Israel and ill-conceived congressional gambits. The Menendez-Kirk-Schumer bill may be politically expedient, but it is also entirely unnecessary and dangerous.

2b)Iran hangs 40 people in two weeks amid surge in executions

Iranian authorities have executed 40 people, most of them for drugs offences, since the beginning of January. (Orla 2011/Shutterstock.com)

Iran has carried out a total of 40 executions since the beginning of 2014, with at least 33 carried out in the past week alone, said Amnesty International today.

“The spike in the number of executions carried out so far this month in Iran is alarming. The Iranian authorities’ attempts to change their international image are meaningless if at the same time executions continue to increase”, said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The death penalty is a violation of every human being’s right to life and is a cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

“The Iranian authorities must urgently take steps to abolish the death penalty, which has been shown again and again not to have any special deterrent effect on crime,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said.

Since the beginning of 2014, Amnesty International has recorded 21 executions which were officially acknowledged by the Iranian authorities, as well as 19 additional executions reported through reliable sources.

In the week since 9 January 2014 more officially acknowledged executions were carried out in Iran than during the whole month of January 2013.

At least one public execution was carried out on 14 January 2014 in Saveh, Markazi Province, northern Iran, of an individual convicted of murder.

Public executions in Iran are usually carried out using cranes which lift the condemned person by a noose around the neck in front of a crowd of spectators.

The organization is calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately adopt an official moratorium on all executions and commute all death sentences. The Iranian authorities must also end all secrecy surrounding their use of the death penalty.

Most of those executed in Iran had been convicted of alleged drug-related offences. Under international standards, non-lethal crimes such as drugs offences do not meet the threshold of “most serious crimes” to which the death penalty must be restricted. There is also no right to a meaningful appeal for drugs offences under Iran’s Anti-Narcotics Law, contrary to its international obligations to ensure that anyone convicted of a criminal offence has the right to appeal the conviction.

“In Iran drug-related offences are tried in Revolutionary Courts which routinely fall far short of international fair trial standards. The reality in Iran is that people are being ruthlessly sentenced to death after unfair trials, and this is unacceptable,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.

Revolutionary Court trials are frequently held behind closed doors and judges have the discretion to restrict lawyers’ access to the defendant during pre-trial investigations in limited cases.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception.

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